Heads up, rumor fiends; faithful viewer Rich Wolfert was the first to inform us of the return of that legendary AppleInsider report. You know the one we mean-- the article on the flat-panel iMac which allegedly materialized and then mysteriously vanished last Thursday night like some sort of spooky Scooby Doo "phantom web page." (They would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.) However, we suspect that the article is sorta like Brigadoon and it only magically appears for a single day once every hundred years, so we strongly recommend that you check it out ASAP. If you were one of the six people who saw the original AI report when it briefly and anomalously shimmered into being last week, you may want to check to see if anything's changed; judging by the 11/29 date stamp, we're guessing "no."

Anyway, so this time we actually got to read the dirt ourselves, and we have to admit it makes a whole lot more sense than the scenario we'd built up from second-hand eyewitness accounts the first time around. To recap, AI's sources indicate that the flat-panel iMac is due to appear early next year (though not necessarily as early as Macworld Expo) and that it will look pretty much like a 15-inch Apple Studio Display carrying a few extra holiday pounds. The specs are juicy enough to give you visions of iMacs dancing in your heads: a G3 processor "running at speeds approaching 1 GHz," a 32 MB nVIDIA GeForce2 MX graphics subsystem, and "at least" 128 MB of RAM-- because these iMacs are allegedly going to ship with Mac OS X as their default operating system. (If that last detail is true, here's hoping that Apple is serious about that "at least" clause; given current RAM prices, we'd love to see every Mac ship with a minimum of 256 MB, because the new operating system feeds on RAM like Bill Gates feeds on the unblemished souls of innocent children.)

The bit that made us particularly skeptical last week was the idea that Apple might ship a high-end LCD-based iMac complete with a Superdrive for the low, low price of just $1299-- a move that would never, ever happen given current pricing and technological restrictions unless Uncle Steve went off his meds. Now we see that the $1299 price point is for a combo drive model, whereas a DVD-burning iMac would go for $1599. That still sounds low to us, though at least it's within the realm of sanity. Of course, there are other reasons why these specs smell fishy, such as the fact that Apple has always maintained that a G4's "Velocity Engine" is necessary to crunch the numbers in iDVD before the sun goes nova, yet these supposed iMacs are still G3-based.

But hey, entertainment is all about a willing suspension of disbelief, and above all we're glad that AppleInsider is back from wherever it went-- because while we dig Mac OS Rumors and all, variety is the spice of life. If it weren't, no one would have cable... and that's a world far too frightening for us to contemplate. Welcome back, AI, and for the sake of Mac rumor addicts everywhere, the next time you go on hiatus, try to come back sooner than "soon."